In Order To Survive, You Must Evolve
by Taka ichijouji
Summary: 18 years have passed since the world became aware of the Digital World and Digimon, but evil still lurks. When a cyber-terrorist group called Evolution starts using artifacts from the days of the Digimon Emperor, Izzy and Ken must team up to stop them. Ken soon realizes that he must delve into his past to save his future.


I am putting up the first chapter of my story to gauge response. I have quite a few chapters so far, but it's not finished and I want to see if anyone thinks this has potential. It's been a long time since Digimon ended in America, but I still think it's the best. I own nothing. This story sample is simply a result of too much time on Netflix.

Chapter 1

Mornings for Izzy were never easy. They usually started with a cup of coffee and a moan. Tentomon would buzz around, chipper as usual. Izzy never could understand how any digimon partner of his could possibly be so happy when the sun rose.

"Izzy, an urgent email!" The bug's voice barked into Izzy's thoughts.

"You really need to stop playing games on my computer in the morning. Can't I at least have my first sip of coffee before you feel the need to inform me that there's another problem at work?" Izzy sighed.

Tentomon cocked his head curiously at him.

"No."

Izzy nodded in defeat and looked over at his computer. Indeed there was an alert that said "Urgent email." He clicked it.

"Dr. Koushiro, the scans picked up strange signals coming from a far corner of Server. There's been severe physical damage as well as corrupted data to the area. Please reply with action plan ASAP!"

It was from one of the interns. They were always ruffled by something. A bunch of Numemon could've gotten into a sludge fight and Izzy would get a scared email about the increase of sludge in the area. Izzy continued to drink his coffee and loaded a map of the digital world along with the new scan's from last night.

Indeed it did look like someone wanted to make some noise in one of the forests. It wasn't a fairly large area, so it was most likely not made by stampeding digimon. Izzy noted that the destruction was strange. In fact, from the looks of the destruction, it seemed as though some trees had simply exploded without warning. Even for the digital world, that was a bit odd.

Izzy called into the interns while he got dressed.

"Dr. Koushiro! Did you get my message?" The female intern panicked on the phone.

"Yes, yes. I'm heading into the digital world from my home computer." Izzy sighed as he buttoned the last button of his shirt and fixed his hair in the mirror. "Track me on my digivice and keep a gate open in case I need back up. I forgot, what kind of digimon do you have?"

Izzy held out his digivice and opened a gate.

"Tapirmon, sir. Digivolves to Unimon." The female said proudly.

"Excellent. Let's hope we don't need him."

And with that, Izzy and Tentomon headed to investigate the digital world.

Because of the time delay between the worlds, the sun was starting to sink as soon as Izzy touched boots on the digital dirt. The gate dropped the digidestined and his partner only a half mile from the destruction, so Izzy decided a casual walk to the area was fine.

"Ah, Tentomon. It's been a little while since we've been to the digital world alone." Izzy said, smiling.

"Mmm, hmm. The investigation team get's on my nerves sometimes. All their fancy equipment beeping everywhere." Tentomon buzzed.

"Hey, now. I did invent most of that fancy equipment." Izzy laughed. "You are right, though. But it's for the best. The digital world is so peaceful because of our efforts."

The walk was less than eventful, but soon, Izzy's digivice chirped from in his pocket.

"Sir, have you come across the area yet? The data is corrupted where you are so we cannot get a signal lock." The female voice spoke through the digivice.

Izzy looked around, his digivice now in hand. While everything looked like a normal forest, every now and then, a tree flickered, becoming blocky and dark with code flashing on it, before returning to normal.

"Yes, Yuri. I see the corruption. Heading towards the blast radius."

Izzy made is way to where the physical explosion must have happened. The area was exactly as he thought. Craters where tree's were supposed to be, the trees surrounding the craters blown back in all directions. Some of the trees were normal, but many where flickering with corrupted code.

Izzy took out a tablet, the replacement for his tried and true laptop computer, and booted it up. The tablet immediately hooked itself into the digiworld code and started scanning.

"Yuri, I'm doing a data scan within the area. It should be connecting to you soon."

"Yes, sir."

The tablet scrolled through thousands of lines of code, all pretty standard and familiar to Izzy. Izzy decided to walk over to one of the corrupted trees to get a better look.

"Izzy, be careful." Tentomon warned. "Corrupted data can hurt your code here too."

"I know, Tentomon." Izzy soothed. "I'm just taking a look."

As Izzy neared the tree, it flickered again. Then Izzy saw something he thought he would never see again.

"Wha...?" Izzy whispered. Then he reached out, grabbed the tree and ripped it's bark off.

Underneath the bark was lines and lines of code. But not standard digiworld code. It was the code of darkness. It was the code of the black gears and it was the code of the dark rings. Izzy growled in anger.

"Oh, this is NOT good." Izzy said. Tentomon backed up from the tree.

"Izzy, I have a really bad feeling about this..." Tentomon cried. He knew the code all too well and what it did to the digital world.

"Yuri. I need a port opened. Here! NOW!" Izzy barked into his digivice.

"Yes, Doctor. Just one second." Yuri's voice hurried with concern.

Within a minute, a television materialized at Izzy's feet.

"Come on, Tentomon." Izzy said, grabbing him and holding up his digivice.

"Wait! I haven't prepared..." Yuri's voice said as Izzy felt the pull of the portal and he was sucked back into the real world.

"Oof!" Whatever Izzy landed on was not very soft.

"... to get out of the way..." the muffled voice of Yuri cried from underneath Izzy's body.

Izzy and Tentomon scrambled to get off the poor intern. Yuri was a young women of twenty. She had come for a summer job and liked it so much she decided to stay and train full time while going to school for computer science. She was thin with short brown hair and had an attitude of naivety and learning about her. Izzy didn't admit it much, but he enjoyed her company. Compared to many of the other short term interns, she was the nicest and (as tentomon has proclaimed on numerous occasions) the prettiest.

At the moment she was, what they call in the world of digital research, hooked in. She wore an earpiece that was connected to her digivice, which connected to a computer that linked to the digital world so that she could communicate with anyone who was also linked to the digital world. She also wore special glasses that had one lens. This lens continuously scrolled digital code so that at all time her eye would be scanning for issues, corruption and gaps in the code of the digital world. Her desk contained three screens, one for the digital world grid, one for code and one that Izzy just fell out of.

"Sorry about that, Yuri." Izzy said sheepishly. Tentomon simply sighed.

"Give us more warning next time." Tapirmon said, clearly annoyed that he was almost crushed.

Tapirmon kind of looks like an aardvark, or a really small elephant. Izzy didn't mind him too much. Since the digital world was now open to everyone, it meant that everyone also had a digimon. Compared to some of the digimon the interns had as partners, Tapirmon was a pretty good partner.

He was a bit over-protective of Yuri, but Izzy and Tentomon chalked that up to the fact that Yuri did not receive her partner until she was almost 18 while most children where getting them at birth these days. Yuri said it had something to do with being too scared to have one.

"Yeah, yeah. Hey, if you were there and saw what we saw, you wouldn't care who you crashed into as long as you got out of there as fast as possible!" Tentomon scolded.

"What did you guys see?" Yuri inquired. "We see corrupted data a lot these days from the high traffic into the digiwold. I can't imagine a little flickering is what spooked you all."

Izzy paused for a moment. He wasn't sure how much he wanted to say.

"Yuri, this was no ordinary corruption. What we saw is something I have not seen in a very long time. We need a consult." Izzy sighed.

"A consult? On the digiworld? Who could possibly know more about digimon data than you?" Yuri laughed.

"Did they ever teach you about the history of the digital world?" Izzy asked.

"A little. I think I slept through most of it since it was an 8am class. There was a bunch of stuff about crests, evil digimon and other dimensions." Yuri smiled, embarrassed.

"Hmmm. Well, I hope you didn't sleep through the part about Ken Ichijouji."

Ken inhaled deeply with his cigarette. The quick break he got between cases was really the only time he got to have them. He'd been trying to quit for a while, but he couldn't break the habit. Ken thought how he would love to kick teenage Ken in the pants for getting into them back in high school. But the new fame from having the digital world open to the world brought him stressed him out and not even Yolie could keep him from picking up bad habits. Plus, once people discovered his dark secret, it was even worse.

"I thought I'd find you out here." Wormmon's voice shattered his thought. Ken quickly threw away the cigarette.

"Wormmon. I thought you went to get a snack." Ken laughed, blowing the last bit of smoke out his mouth.

"You know if Yolie finds out, she will kill you." Wormmon said sternly.

"Only if you tell her. Also, she'd probably kill you too for not getting me to stop." Ken shot back.

"Probably." Wormmon sighed. Ken picked him up.

"Don't worry. It's a once a day habit. I'll try to do better." Ken smiled.

"Well, you may need to buy another pack after what I tell you." Ken heard a voice he hadn't heard for months.

"Izzy!" Ken looked over and saw the older digidestined waving at him, surrounded by his digimon and a young girl who could only be a digiworld researcher from the odd glasses she wore. "I see you brought friends. Wouldn't expect to see you here at my work. Or one of your researchers."

"Sorry, she insisted on coming." Izzy said sheepishly.

Yuri smiled broadly. Ken cringed internally. He knew _that_ look. It was the fan girl look. He hated the fan girl look.

"S-s-so very nice to meet you, Detective Ichijouji." Yuri stammered, bowing toward him.

Ken sighed. "You as well, miss...?"

"Yuri! Yuri Sukiya." Yuri smiled broadly again.

Ken turned toward Izzy.

"So what brings me the pleasure? I don't think we have another get together in the Digiworld scheduled for another month."

"Well..." Izzy laughed. "It's about my research. So, as you know, our main mission is scanning for issues in the data stream and fixing them."

"To create a more perfect digital world, yada yada yada." Ken prompted Izzy to get to the point. "You forget how much I helped you when you first started your company."

"I came across some corrupted data this morning." Izzy ignored Ken's sarcasm. After all, it was still morning. Izzy pulled out his tablet. "The code had changed to this. Look familiar?"

The tablet loaded up with the corrupted data stream from the tree. Ken glanced at it casually, then he had his full attention.

"Not possible! This code has been long gone." Ken exclaimed. "When did this happen?"

"Last night. Around 2am our time. Pixel forest, southeast corner." Yuri said a-matter-of-factly.

"I need your glasses." Ken said, and reached for Yuri's head. "They are still connected to the digiworlds data stream, right?"

"Yes, but please be careful. They are one of a kind." Yuri said nervously.

Izzy laughed. "Yuri, he created these glasses."

"Load 1-alpha-W, master program, user Osamu, password wormmon!" Ken barked as he put on the glasses.

The glasses stopped it's constant data scan and the glass went blank. Then the glasses reloaded and scrolled: WELCOME BACK, KEN.

"Digi-glass, I want a full data sweep report from grid 42-B last night at 2am." Ken commanded to the glasses, though it seemed quite strange to be talking to something on your face.

"Woah." Yuri gasped. "I didn't know those things could do anything other than scan"

"Yeah, I don't play with them too much. Ken put a whole bunch of apps on it, but since quite a few of them were just genni's stupid upgrades of digimon dancing, I really didn't feel like going through them." Izzy scratched the back of his head in embarrassment.

Ken stared at his invention's screen for a while. Wormmon and tentomon caught up on old times while Izzy and Yuri surfed the web on their phones. After what seemed like an hour, Ken finally sighed and took off the glasses.

"Well, good luck to you, Izzy. Hope you can resolve the problem." Ken said, defeated. "Come on, Wormmon. We've got cases to go over."

Izzy became slack-jawed.

"Seriously? You're not going to help?" Izzy said incredulously.

"I'm not getting involved." Ken said. "Whoever corrupted that tree did it for a reason. I don't care to know what that reason is. I gave up on that stuff a long time ago."

"But, but, but you must know something. It's your code." Izzy stammered.

"You don't understand..." Ken sighed. "It's my past. I don't like revisiting it."

Izzy paused. He did understand. Ken hated how everyone knew what happened to him when he was 13. It was a sad, large part of history when it came to the digidestined, so it was bound to get out. But who likes to be reminded that technically they were worse than Hitler as a child?

"Just... come with me to the digital world. It might be a coincidence. Your code was all over the place a while back. Maybe someone just discovered it and didn't realize what it was." Izzy said quietly. Then he chuckled. "Besides, us bug digidestined need to stick together. Whadaya say?"

Ken rolled his eyes.

"Just this once. And you owe me!" Ken said, and went back to the police station to grab his coat and digivice.

Izzy looked to Yuri and shrugged.

"Well, that went better than expected."


End file.
